The Printed Page

My usual bookcase picture has gone MIA so I decided to go with this cutie napping amongst the books. Summer is almost here and the books are piling up. TV shows, for the most part, are done and reading kicked into high gear mid-month. I read 11 books, 4,514 pages and DNF’d one. There are no formal book reviews for May.

Title: Mother of the Believers: A Novel of the Birth of Islam
Author/website: Kamran Pasha
527 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publication date: April ’09
Genre: Historical fiction
I enjoyed this book. Be warned though it is more on the historical side of the story than character based.

Deep in the desert of seventh century Arabia, a new prophet named Muhammad has arisen. After he beholds a beautiful woman in a vision and resolves to marry her, the girl’s father quickly arranges the wedding. Aisha becomes the youngest of Muhammad’s twelve wives and her feisty nature and fierce intelligence establishes her as his favorite. But when Aisha is accused of adultery by her rivals, she loses the Prophet’s favor—and must fight to prove her innocence.

Title: The Reincarnationist
Author/website: M.J. Rose
Pages: 464
Publisher: Mira
Publication date: October ’08
Genre: Contemporary/historical fiction
I really enjoyed this novel though the ending was a tiny bit of a letdown. I’m looking forward to reading the next novel in this series, The Memorist.

After a bomb explosion nearly kills photojournalist Josh Ryder, he begins experiencing flashbacks—or, perhaps, memories—of events that seem to have happened to him 1,600 years earlier, in another life. Convinced these episodes aren’t figments of his imagination, he enlists the aid of the Phoenix Foundation, a group that specializes in past-life research. Later, when he becomes involved in the unearthing of an ancient tomb—and experiences a connection with its long-buried resident—Josh realizes he has a chance to right a wrong that happened a millennium and a half ago, not to mention an opportunity to solve a series of modern-day murders.

Title: Rooftops of Tehran
Author/website: Mahbod Seraji
Pages: 368
Publisher: NAL Trade
Publication date: May ’09
Genre: Fiction
For me this book started a bit slow but I was more than hooked by the end.

Pasha Shahed is a typical teenage boy who likes hanging out with his friends on the rooftop terrace of his house, dreaming about life, love, and what the future holds. What makes this 17-year-old different is that he is living under the harsh reign of the shah in Iran during the summer of 1973. With his biggest worry being his feelings for Zari, the girl next door who has been promised to another since birth, Pasha has a rude awakening when the SAVAK, Iran’s secret police, hunt down and murder Zari’s fiancé. When Pasha realizes that he is the one who unwittingly gave away the man’s whereabouts to the SAVAK, he is crushed with guilt over his rival’s death and his continued feelings for Zari. No longer ignorant of the brutality of the shah’s regime, Zari makes a public display of her protest, which devastates Pasha.

Title: Promises in Death
Author/website: J.D. Robb
Pages: 352
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Publication date: February ’09
Genre: Police procedural
I love this series!

NYPD Lieutenant Eve Dallas always does her best to solve every one of her cases, but her latest assignment just might be her most difficult yet. Not only was the victim, Amarylis Coltraine, a cop who was killed with her own weapon, but the case also takes on an added personal dimension since Amarylis was Chief Medical Examiner Morris’ lover, and Morris is one of Eve’s best friends. When the killer sends Eve a package containing Coltraine’s badge, weapon, and a taunting note suggesting that she might be next on the list, Eve finds herself trying to untangle a case that may be linked to her own past.

Title: Nineteen Minutes
Author/website: Jodi Picoult
Pages: 464
Publisher: Atria
Publication date: March ’07
Genre: Fiction
My favorite after My Sister’s Keeper.

In Sterling, New Hampshire, 17-year-old high school student Peter Houghton has endured years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of classmates. His best friend, Josie Cormier, succumbed to peer pressure and now hangs out with the popular crowd that often instigates the harassment. One final incident of bullying sends Peter over the edge and leads him to commit an act of violence that forever changes the lives of Sterling’s residents.

Title: Who Do You Think You Are: A Memoir by Alyse Myers
Author/website: Alyse Myers
Pages: 272
Publisher: Touchstone
Publication date: April ’09
Genre: Memoir
This memoir is depressing but I’m glad I read it.

Growing up during the 1960s in a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, Alyse’s home is not a happy one. Her parents argue constantly and after the death of Alyse’s father, her mother at age thirty-three is left with three young girls. While her mother retreats to the kitchen table with her cigarettes and bitterness, determined to stay there forever, Alyse yearns for more in life, including the right to escape. After a childhood of harrowing fights, abject cruelty, and endless uncertainty, Alyse adamantly rejects everything about her mother’s life, provoking her mother’s infuriated demand, “Who do you think you are?”

Title: In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom
Author/website: Qanta Ahmed
Pages: 464
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc
Publication date: September ’08
An absolutely fascinating and intriguing look at womens’ lives under Wahhabism, a reformist movement of Sunni Islam in the Saudi Kingdom.

Denied visa renewal in America, British-born Pakistani physician Ahmed, 31, leaves New York for a job in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she celebrates her Muslim faith on an exciting Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca even as she encounters rabid oppression from the state-sanctioned religious extremist police. She is licensed to operate ICU machines in the emergency ward, but as a woman, she is forbidden to drive, and she must veil every inch of herself. Her witty insider-outsider commentary as a Muslim and feminist, both reverent and highly critical, provides rare insight into the upper-class Saudi scene today, including the roles of women and men in romance, weddings, parenting, divorce, work, and friendship. After 9/11, she is shocked at the widespread anti-Americanism. The details of consumerism, complete with Western brand names, get a bit tiresome, but they are central to this honest memoir about connections and conflicts, and especially the clamorous clash of “modern and medieval, . . . Cadillac and camel.”

Title: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Author/website: Katherine Howe
Pages: 384
Publisher: Voice
Publication date: June ’09
Genre: Contemporary/historical fiction
While I enjoyed this book I wish the author had spent more time on the historical sections.

Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie’s grandmother’s abandoned home near Salem, she can’t refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest–to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.

As the pieces of Deliverance’s harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem’s dark past then she could have ever imagined.

Title: The Firemaster’s Mistress: A Novel
Author/website: Christie Dickason
Pages: 544
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Publication date: September ’08
Genre: Historical fiction
It was OK but nothing memorable.

Firemaster Francis Quoynt knew creating fireworks from gunpowder was dangerous, but he didn’t realize that politics could be even more deadly. Francis quickly discovers just how lethal working for the government can be when he is “hired” by English secretary of state Robert Cecil to help investigate rumors of a plot to murder King James I (Gunpowder Plot). Cecil believes Catholics in England are planning on trying to overthrow the Protestant monarch, and Francis’ mission is to do everything he can to help them. What Francis didn’t count on was that one of the conspirators would turn out to be glove-maker Kate Peach, and that if he succeeds in his plan, he could very well end up having the woman he loves killed.

Title: The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection
Author/website: Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler
Pages: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication date: April ’09
Genre: Non-fiction
DNF’d after 114 pages
Normally this is the type of book I’d devour but I didn’t finish it. It started out with the crime and then got mired down in page after endless page of mind-numbing facts. I wish they would have continued with the crime and it’s solution weaving in these facts as needed to move this story along.

Turn-of-the-century Paris was the beating heart of a rapidly changing world. Painters, scientists, revolutionaries, poets–all were there. But so, too, were the shadows: Paris was a violent, criminal place, its sinister alleyways the haunts of Apache gangsters and its cafes the gathering places of murderous anarchists. In 1911, it fell victim to perhaps the greatest theft of all time–the taking of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Immediately, Alphonse Bertillon, a detective world-renowned for pioneering crime-scene investigation techniques, was called upon to solve the crime. And quickly the Paris police had a suspect: a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso….

Title: The Tory Widow
Author/website: Christine Blevins
Pages: 400
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Publication date: April ’09
Genre: Historical fiction
I enjoyed this book and I’m looking forward to reading the next two in this trilogy. A nice mix of history and romance with very likable characters.

On a bright May day in New York City, Anne Peabody receives an unexpected kiss from a stranger. Bringing news of the repeal of the Stamp Act, Jack Hampton, a member of the Sons of Liberty, abruptly sweeps Anne into his arms, kisses her—and then leaves her to her fate of an arranged marriage…

1775: Nearly ten years have passed and Anne, now the Widow Merrick, continues her late husband’s business printing Tory propaganda, not because she believes in the cause, but because she needs the money to survive. When her shop is ransacked by the Sons of Liberty, Anne once again comes face to face with Jack and finds herself drawn to the ardent patriot and his rebel cause.

As shots ring out at Lexington and war erupts, Anne is faced with a life-altering decision: sit back and watch her world torn apart, or stand and fight for both her country’s independence and her own.

Title: A World I Never Made
Author/website: James LePore
Pages: 262
Publisher: Story Plant
Publication date: April ’09
Genre: Suspense/thriller
Review coming June 15th

Pat Nolan is summoned from his Connecticut home to Paris after he is informed his only child Megan, a 29 year-old writer, has committed suicide in this well-plotted and briskly paced post 9/11 thriller. Nolan and his daughter have been estranged, and he could not have known that Megan was selling herself to wealthy and powerful men in all of Europe’s capitals and in Morocco. Nolan, still grieving the death of his wife during Megan’s birth, is asked to identify his child’s remains. The body is not Megan’s, though for some inexplicable reason, he says it is. Subsequently he learns Megan has left clever clues, indicating that she wants her father to find her. Nolan is assisted by the inevitably beautiful widow, French Det. Catherine Laurence, whose despised husband was conveniently killed in terrorist bombings only months before. The action moves from Paris to exotic and rugged locales spanning two continents.

***
Favorite books: The Reincarnationist & Nineteen Minutes
Least favorite book: The Crimes of Paris

***
Genres:
Contemporary/historical fiction – 5
Suspense/action/thriller – 1
Police procedural – 1
Memoir – 2
Fiction – 1
Non-fiction – 1

Total pages – 4,514

Challenges
eBook – 4
New author – 10
ARCs/Review copies – 7
’09 Pub – 8

***

Challenges (YTD)
eBook – 14/10 (Done!)
New author – 51/65
ARCs/Review copies – 47
’09 Pub – 32/9 (Done!)